In a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio a third grader receives a Playboy Magazine offer in the mail! Should you ever doubt the predatory nature of pornographers, here is case in point.

The young boy is actually my son. Thankfully, my wife retrieved the mail with the enclosed offer!Usually my son gets the mail for her, but not on this day.She was so outraged that she has called and emailed whoever will listen, including Playboy Magazine.

The advertisement was provocative enough that my wife did not want even me to see it. I sat and imagined what his response would have been when he saw a half-naked woman on a piece of mail addressed to him.There are 2 responses that he would have a choice from, in my mind.

The first and ideal response would have been for him to show his mother and to have her quickly whisk the offer away. Then she would praise him for showing her and using good judgment.She’d have to explain to him the sinfulness in such magazines and how awful it was for them to send out such offers.

I image he would have looked like this had he opened the mail

The second response would have been for him to hide the offer and not tell anyone. The offer would be hidden in a secret spot and he would bring it out to ponder and look at the ad.What a dilemma it would cause for him!The photo is appealing to him, but he does not fully understand why.It also makes him feel dirty for looking at it and feeling the need to hide it.

At his age I know what I would have done – the second response. It was what I did when I found my Dad’s magazines.

I am very thankful that my wife intercepted the mail today. It seriously is getting me thinking on when and how I have to share with him about ‘the birds and the bees’. I need to start pouring into him and modeling for him the proper way to treat women – more intentionally.I need to give him respect for women so that later on when he does get exposed to pornography, he will know for certain it is wrong and will respond to it as in the first scenario above.

Parents, we have a responsibility to protect our kids and mold them into God fearing, people loving adults. Please reflect on what you would do, or would have done in this situation.

Vanity of Life in the Flesh

When you sit down and ponder life in this fleshly body you really realize how vain much of what we do is. We spend so much time to make our bodies attractive. Women put on jewelry, apply makeup, spray on perfume and carefully dress to look good. Men will work out, shave, and try to regrow hair all to keep up their appearance. Cosmetic surgery is more widely used than ever. We all just try to look attractive and maintain youthful appearances.

Much of our time is also spent in satisfying and nurturing our flesh. Our bodies need sleep to rebuild and reset every day. We need to eat and drink to keep our bodies in motion and functioning. Sleeping and eating take up a lot of time every day. We also do other things that feed or satisfy our flesh, like sex, drugs, and alcohol, but are not necessary for sustaining our life.

If you add all these activities up and then think about how we have to work to provide these things that focus around these bodies of ours, it all seems in vain. We have an expiration date the day we are born. If we center our lives on these fleshly bodies of ours, doesn’t it seem a waste of time? We primp, workout, eat, shelter and gratify these bodies only to put them into a grave to rot! If we live our lives centered on our own flesh our lives are wasted!

These fleshly bodies transport a spirit that will live on! What we do in our flesh determines how we will spend eternity in our spirit. With all this in mind, do we continue to live for today or for eternity? Do we continue to center our lives on the body – the maintenance, dress, and satisfying of it? No! How vain that is!

We should live with eternity in mind. The rewards and consequences that come in eternity are decided here and now. Instead of being so self-centered, we should look to please God. Do things for others. Focus our mind and sight on Jesus. Live the life that is led by the Spirit.

These bodies are only jars of clay. In other words, we are fragile and made of dirt. Our body is temporary. The jar is not what is valuable, what is inside is. What is inside will live on forever. The jar can be shattered and crumble.

The next time you turn to pornography and masturbation think: What impact will this have on my body and spirit? Is this activity building up my body or spirit? What will be the consequences to my body and spirit if I do this? What about if I don’t do this? Could this time be invested in something of value?

Holiday Porn Binge

Tips on how not to indulge this holiday

The holiday season is the time of the year when we let out guards down and indulge in many things we might say no to most other times. This time of the year we tend to say ‘why not’ instead of ‘no thanks’. Food and drink are the most common indulgences we allow ourselves, but another unspoken one is pornography.

Opportunity – Most of us take time off around the holidays and this breaks our normal routines of sleeping and waking. The opportunity presents itself for some late night or mid day sessions with the pornography.

Need for escape – The holiday season is fast paced and fun-filled. Sometimes we need to take a break from it all and escape into the fantasy world.

Loneliness – For those who have no significant other or family to be with, the intimacy of pornography is what we turn to, to try and make us feel better.

The worst thing is that it doesn’t make us feel better and alleviate the pain or boredom; pornography only compounds our ill feelings and brings us down. Instead of going on a pornography binge for the holidays, here are a few tips to help you not fall into that trap.

Keep your normal schedule – Go to bed and wake up close to your regular schedule. Don’t be seduced by late night movies or internet surfing, especially when everyone else has gone to bed. Go to bed when the rest of the family does!

Unplug from the holiday madness – Get away with your spouse for a quiet lunch. Don’t go to every holiday party you are invited to, causing holiday burn out. Go for a walk in the park and experience the chilly air, wildlife and solitude. Go to church and connect with the true meaning of Christmas.

Don’t spend the holidays alone – Invite friends or family over. Go volunteer somewhere such as a shelter, ring the Salvation Army bell, or at the local food bank. Get out of the house and go to where people are and you can have human interaction.

From the beginning of the history of man, Satan has been hard at work trying to exploit our weaknesses. In the garden of Eden, Satan used Eve to appeal to Adam and influence him to disobey God by eating from the forbidden tree. Would Adam have disobeyed if the attack was directly from Satan? Would Eve have been talked into eating the apple if Satan had not used the snake as cover? Luke Gilkerson has a fantastic post “How Nakedness Effected the Fall” where he makes the points that we are fighting against Satan’s attacks masked as flesh and that Satan knows our weak spots and exploits then to make us fall.

Satan is a cunning and crafty enemy. He knows that us men are visually stimulated and attracted to the beauty of women. The nakedness of a woman is powerfully appealing to the flesh of a man. Scripture talks about the two natures of man: Spiritual and fleshly, and how we need to “walk by the spirit so we do not fulfill the desires of the flesh”. These two natures are contrary to each other. The spirit nature agrees with God and seeks to obey Him and fulfill His will. The spirit wants to please God and bring about His kingdom, it is God-centered. Our fleshly nature causes us to seek fleshly pleasures such as feeling good & looking good. The fleshly nature feeds off of sex, food, drugs, & other sensualites. The fleshly nature is self-centered.

Satan knows that we constantly battle between which nature to feed. Knowing this, he goes after our weak point – sex – and uses it to trip up both men and women. If he is successful, we will get hooked on feeding our flesh and we will be disobedient to God.

Satan can take down man through the woman! Clever isn’t it? He will get women to disobey God in a variety of ways. Some are lured into making pornography. Some women just dress provacatively. Other women sleep around or get into partying & alcohol. When Satan gets women to go against God & feed their flesh, they in turn will lure men away from God. We men are weak when it comes to women. Isn’t it very hard to push away from the advances of an attractive woman? How hard is it to stop from taking a second look at an attractive woman or even more one without clothes?

God knew this and instructed the Jews to not marry outside women. If a Jew married a pagan woman, most of the time he would abandon God for the god of his pagan wife. Satan has been using this scheme to get men from the very beginning. Its the perfect scheme – get the woman and she will bring a man down with her! Worked back then and it still works today!

Now that you know this scheme, what are you going to do about it? Has this tactic used by the enemy to take us out now lost power in your life?

Women – Stop being used by Satan! Be pure, honest & loyal to God. Don’t let yourself be a stumbling block for those around you.

Men – Don’t get so easily led to failure by the sensuality of women. Stand strong and see this scheme for what it is – the battle for your soul.

I was always a curious kid who wanted to learn and explore. One day while my friend and I were poking around in my garage, we found a calendar with a topless woman on it. We quickly sneaked it out of the garage to someplace we could admire it without being caught. I still remember the excitement that calendar lit up inside me. From then on, I was on the prowl for anything similar that I could get my hands on.

Those things that I later found came in the form of a Jacques Cousteau book (sad to admit) and then a treasure trove of Playboy magazines in my basement. At those times, I’m not sure what was more exciting, the pictures or the thrill of doing something wrong and trying not to get caught!

All the guilt eventually caught up with me and I asked my mom about the magazines and if Dad was still and ‘alright’ guy for having them. Man, was I ever a hypocrite. After a while, my Dad threw away his stash and guess who scooped up a bunch for his own collection…me of course!

I also remember buying single naked pictures from my friend for a buck a piece. He would rip them out of his dad’s large collection and sell them to me and my friend. I remember buying as many as he would sell. He was very cautious and hesitant and eventually stopped selling them due to getting caught.

My own stash was stored in a few different places over the years. I never put them under the mattress, that was such an amateur move! At first, I would hide them under the carpet inside my closet. It was perfect cause I would move stuff over top and no one would know. I even cleared out half the closet so I could sit in there with my flashlight and look at my pictures. At other times I would hide my magazines in a bunch of auto show literature.

Those were the early days of my pornography addiction. That first taste lit a desire within me that really took over me for about 20 years. Why do I relay this story? Well, a lot of it has to do with remembering this stuff today while I mowed the lawn. The other reason is that I want to show you where I have been and to let you know that you are not much different than me. Another thing – Do all you can to keep your kids away from pornography! They eventually will come in contact with it, but make it much later in life after they learn about what real love is and how to treat a woman.

Please share your story with us… How did you get exposed to pornography? What did that do to you?

Where is a lifeguard when you need one? Lifeguard whistles

If you are searching to buy a lifeguard whistle, please find a nice selection of them here- lifeguard whistles Otherwise, keep reading 🙂

My family and I just came back from one of those indoor water park resorts. We had a great time together and did plenty of swimming.

These types of places are filled with people, pools and lifeguards. There are lifeguards everywhere you turn whether you go on a water slide or wade in the wave pool. They do an excellent job of whistling people away from unacceptable behavior and unknown dangers. Their job is to make sure you are safe and don’t do anything stupid to hurt yourself.

One thing I noticed with my kids is that they would look to the lifeguard every time the whistle blew. A few times it was for them, like when they were doing handstands on the bottom of the pool. Most of the time it was for someone else that was getting to close to the edge or to close to the buoys where the wave machine works.

The lifeguards were watching everyone swim and would not let you get away with breaking a pool rule. My kids would do something and then look up to the lifeguard to see whether it was ok to do it. Once they found out that handstands were not allowed they didn’t try to do them again. They love handstands, but the lifeguards were always watching and they did not want to get busted.

When we are tempted to look at pornography, where is the lifeguard ready to blow the whistle on us? Believe it or not, there are lifeguards to keep us from sinning. One of them is called our conscience. Right before you click on that button to look at pornography, your conscience tells you to stop.

Another very similar lifeguard is the Holy Spirit which will do the same thing and urge you to run. Hopefully you can still hear your conscience or the Holy Spirit as they blow the whistle and tell you to stop. If you cannot hear them anymore, you have crushed these warnings long enough that you can’t hear them! You are ignoring them and need to slow yourself down to recognize them again. Remember that the eyes of The Lord are everywhere and while you think no one else can see you, He can!

Other lifeguards are the ones that we set up for ourselves. Internet filtering programs such as Covenant Eyes or X3 watch will serve as a lifeguard when you get tempted. There is also a program that will text your accountability partner when you start hitting websites that suggest you are ready to fail.

Some other practical lifeguards are locking out certain cable channels, keeping your computer in a public place, not allowing or getting yourself out of perfect storm situations, and calling your accountability partner to share your temptations with them.

Don’t allow yourself to even come close to drowning in pornography. You must heed the natural and supernatural lifeguards in your life. Don’t forget to set up some other practical lifeguards in your life as well. When you do these, it will be much harder to harm yourself and fall prey to the satan and his schemes.

I write this tonight from a point of vulnerability. This is a lesson we all can learn from.

The title for this post is the perfect storm to be bad. The perfect storm is that storm where all the conditions are just right to produce a real powerfull, destructive, wickedly dangerous storm. When the perfect conditions come together like this, you better take shelter. On the sea, you may not have a choice but to ride it out, but on dry land you have many options. You can take shelter inland if a hurricane is coming. You may run to the storm shelter if a tornado is on its way.

The perfect storm I am talking about tonight is not of the natural disaster kind. I am talking about the perfect storm to be bad. When I say be bad, I am refering to the temptation of pornography. Indulging in pornography is definately acting badly.

The perfect storm is the right combination of circumstances and opportunities that present themselves to the addict who has to make a decision. That decision is whether to succomb to temptation or to run away and change the circumstances.

Tonight I have the perfect storm here:

A semi private computer

My wife away for the night

My kids in bed

A little beer in my system

I so want to take a peak at some images or videos on yahoo search. You know, just fringy things, no big deal right? Wrong. I need to change my circumstances and quickly. I decided to write this post to express what I am going through and to show you how I am going to run from this.

In a moment when I finish this post I am going to shut down and go to sleep. I don’t need to be on the computer at 10:36 on a Friday night. I will flip on the TV and veg out till I fall asleep. I also will not have any more beer. The beer is good, and I don’t drink a lot of it, but it dulls my inhabitions and conscience causing me to think things that I know I shouldn’t.

So before I sign off and claim a victory over temptation, please tell me what are the conditions for your perfect storm? What do you do about it? Do you forsee the storm and immediately get out of the way? Please share below.

Regular users and/or addicts of pornography generally have a handfull of triggers that set them off on another binge of pornography use. Many of you can identify with an event, a state of mind, or the influences that drive us to using porn. Here are a few items that may trigger your urges:

She is attractive and the middle of the ad focuses on her breasts. – us men are obviously visually oriented.

She has a look of vulnerability or fear on her face – this triggers the manly need to rescue her.

She is posed in a way that asks you to help her, rescue her, love her.

I have seen this ad off to the side of my Yahoo mail at least 50 times and it has caught my eye everytime. In the past, I would have focused on this ad and it would have revved me up to the point of search for pornography then acting out. How do I respond differently now?

Initially I was caught off gaurd with this ad and quickly looked away. (fleeing) As I saw it more often I started to analyze what it was about that ad that was so appealing and those details are above. I did not take the ad into my head and run with it! This is where we get tripped up. You have to train yourself to stop the runaway thoughts that lead into acting out. You need to stop yourself, calm yourself down and move on to another subject. Don’t even entertain thoughts of sex for a few moments thinking you are just skirting the edge. You need to estinguish these lustful thoughts right away! Walk away for 10 minutes, change the channel, call a friend or your accountability partner – Don’t linger.

Many of the triggers that lead us down the road into acting out and using pornography can be counteracted by doing something to oppose that trigger. If boredom leads you into pornography sessions, you need to keep yourself busy – do something to occupy the time. If free time is your downfall, don’t allow yourself to have free time while you are alone. Leave the house and go into a public setting. Invite a friend over. Do you see where I am going? We have to set up a plan (in advance) of what will are going to do when we face a situation that could lead to our downfall. That action plan is a part of your overall Battle Plan to stop using pornography. You will then know what to do and excute the action plan to counteract these attacks before they start.

What are your triggers? What do you find helpfull to counteract everyday situations that could bring your down? Please comment.

Overcoming Sexual Temptations – How to overcome and win.

Sexual temptations are common to all people whether man or woman. We all run into situations where we are tempted in a sexual nature. These temptations can come in the form of a flirtatious coworker, a tantalizing ad or maybe a photo on the internet. Sexual temptations appeal to our inner desire to have sex and be close to someone.

Is temptation a sin? No. Temptations if they are allowed to capture us will lead us into sin, but they are not sin themselves. A temptation is that hook that can draw us into sin. A temptation appeals to our lusts and waits for us to take the bait. A man can see an attractive woman in a revealing top – the temptation. What does he think after seeing the woman, is what determines whether he takes that temptation that appeals to his lust and turns it into sin. It would turn into sin if he mentally undresses her. It would not be sin for him to look another direction and focus his mind on something else.

Temptations appeal to our lusts, or those things we desire which are morally or ethically wrong. Most all of us are sexually tempted because we have a desire for sex. That desire is both physical and emotional. We have desires for things which are wrong. We can lust after another woman or desire to watch a porno. Temptations appeal to these desires and lure us into satisfying the desire.

Not all desires are wrong. We all desire to eat because we get hungry. When we are hungry and see an ad for a cheeseburger, is that cheeseburger temptation? No. It is morally alright to eat and the cheeseburger ad may sway you to heading down to your fast food place, but not wrong.

Temptation comes from the lure of our own evil desires as James 1:14 says. These desires lead to actions. Sinful actions. These evil desires are inside of us. We have the desire to do evil inside of us and temptation wakes us that desire for us to act on.

The key to battling temptation starts with the inside. We have to defeat those evil desires within us. Those desires are written onto our ‘hard drive’ and we have to overwrite them. We can overwrite them with prayer & God’s word. This is not a one-time deal. We have to continually overwrite them because they keep coming back. You need a battle plan.

Pray to God to help you change your evil desires and replace them with desires for pure things. You need help to counteract all those sinful lusts that have found their way to your heart. God can help you if you ask.

You also need to overwrite those lusts with the word of God. Crack your Bible open and find some verses to memorize that counteract your lusts. If you lust with your eyes, memorize Job 31:1 “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a woman”. Read your Bible daily to get God’s word written on your heart. God’s word is more powerful than a two edged sword (Heb 4:12) and has tremendous power to not only save, but destroy the evil desires within you.

Now that you are working on your heart, you need to be aware of where you are tempted and set up a battle plan. If you lust after women with your eyes, you need to set up a plan for numerous scenarios you may encounter that will be temptations. For example: If you are speaking to a woman at work who has a low cut blouse, you decide ahead of time to make eye contact with her or look away when not. You will decide ahead of time what your action will be and then do it when facing the situation.

In other circumstances you will need to heed the Bible’s recommendation and flee temptation. If you are on the internet and see tantalizing ad for free porn, log out and get away from the computer! Flee and don’t let temptation get the best of you. Take the exit God will provide for you.

These are only a few examples of overcoming sexual temptation. You can find more help by in my book.

Prayer to overcome sexual temptation: Dear God, I am under tremendous temptation at the moment to sin against you. Please give me the strength to walk away from this temptation and focus on what is pure, what is true, what is right and anything that is excellent or praiseworthy. I do not want to fall into sin to please my flesh. Allow your Spirit to fill me and work in me right now. In Jesus’ name Amen.